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Spring 2017Blossom Legacy - Good Neighbors

Around the turn of the 20th
century, immigrants from different parts of the world settled in
our Parlier CA neighborhood. In 1908, Mr.
Gensuke Katsura moved from Japan to California and bought a farm along
the bluff of the Kings River. A few years later Dorothy's
great-grandmother and her three adult children came and purchased the
land to the east of the Katsura farm.
By mid-summer of 1942, after the bombing of
Pearl Harbor, all Japanese-Americans living in the Western U.S.
were to be exiled to relocation camps, because they “looked like
the enemy.”
Over a handshake, Dorothy's grandfather,
Reinhold Ewy, agreed to see to it that the neighboring Katsura farm
would be taken care of.
When the war was over and the
Japanese-American families returned, Mr. Ewy and Mr. Katsura sat down
to review the detailed account of income and expenses Mr. Ewy had
kept. Mr. Ewy was shocked, however, when Mr. Katsura said
there was an error in his record keeping. Mr. Katsura had noticed
that no payments to Mr. Ewy for his services had been recorded.
Mr. Ewy simply replied that he would not make a single penny
profit from this horrible injustice that the United States had done to
his friend and good neighbor.
Sometime later, Mr. Katsura, who had a
beautiful traditional Japanese garden, brought Mr. Ewy two little trees
he had budded with wood of a special ornamental blossom. Would
his friend accept these as a token of appreciation?
The Ewy's planted the trees outside their
bedroom window. More than seventy years later, they still bloom every
year around the annual Day of Remembrance for Japanese-American
internment, February 19.
Seventy-five years ago, this internment
publicly violated a people. We hope the telling of this story serves as
a type of public apology, a recognition that Japanese-Americans
were victims who were wronged.